Compare SpaceX to Blue Origin - while SpaceX has succeeded in conquering over 50% of the orbital launch market, Blue Origin still hasn’t made it to orbit - nor has ULA’s new rocket using Blue’s engines. Is that the fault of Blue’s engineers? I don’t think that’s fair - some of them are just as brilliant as SpaceX’s. The real blame, I think, is at the executive level. Bezos has never invested anywhere near as much of his time and energy and personal wealth into Blue as Musk has invested into SpaceX. And Musk has made much better choices of executive leadership (Gwynne Shotwell vs Bob Smith). That’s just one example of the massive difference the ability and commitment of a founder can make to the success of a business. (You’d think on a forum owned by a Silicon Valley VC firm, that point would be uncontested and accepted as obviously true.)
CTOs aren’t always super-technical-and even those who are, while the CTO of a small startup might realistically have an expert-level understanding of all the business’s core technologies, that is no longer a realistic standard when talking about a multi-billion dollar firm with a highly complex or diverse tech stack. Arguably, one of the most important tasks for a CTO, is to be able to tell the difference between good engineering executives and bad ones. And, judged by that standard, Musk actually has done a very good job as SpaceX CTO, much better than many of its major competitors. Doing that requires understanding the technology well-enough to distinguish engineers and engineering leaders who really understand it from those who are just pretending to do so-and I think it is obvious Musk does understand the technologies at SpaceX (and Tesla too) well-enough to successfully make that distinction. People seem to be holding him to an unrealistic standard, which I doubt they’d actually apply to a CTO who wasn’t named Elon Musk.
What about Larry Ellison, CTO of Oracle? Frankly I think Larry Ellison could say any crazy thing he liked, and no one would really care, and he'd stay CTO and chair of Oracle's board. Because C-suite executives get a "free pass" all the time–especially when they combine their C-suite role with a substantial ownership interest in the company (true of both Ellison and Musk). But most C-suite execs, the average person has never heard of them, and so they don't care what they say. Whereas, Musk is a controversial celebrity, so people judge him by rather different standards than the thousands of other near-anonymous CEOs, CTOs and billionaires in the world.
This sounds like labor-theory-of-value BS. Management and leadership is work, and it's essential.